COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE IN A BRAZILIAN SIGN LANGUAGE GLOSSARY: DESIGN OF AN ONLINE SYSTEM STRONGLY INTEGRATED WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

Context:
The Brazilian sign language was recognized as one of the Brazil’s official languages in 2005 and in recent years there is an effort aimed at the construction and formalization of vocabulary in this language. In this context, the education of the deaf is strongly supported by several technological aspects, and the deaf population, in turn, maintains close relation with these technologies, especially social media.

Purpose:
This work intend to look for the necessary guidelines to build a system focused on the deaf public and based on the concept of Community of Practice. That system must be able to organize, search and display video entries in Brazilian sign language.

Methodology:
The project was built based on a partnership between Palhoça Bilingual Campus of Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina, the Deaf Project at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and the Deaf Association of Florianópolis. In this way, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the specialists of the three groups as well with potential deaf users. At the end, a list of requirements was created and, based on that list, the system was specified according to software development methodologies.

Results:
Parameters, defined as important by potential users and experts, were obtained for the search and classification of signs in Brazilian sign language. A relationship between the use of social media and the deaf public was identified. A software project was developed for the construction of a system, integrated to these social media, capable of operate the organization and retrieval of entries in sign language on video. The system is currently undergoing prototyping and interface usability tests.